A South African artificial intelligence start-up has launched a tool to help adults navigate the first few years of parenting, drawing on knowledge from books and peer-reviewed articles to ensure reliability and expert information.
A South African artificial intelligence start-up has launched a tool to help adults navigate the first few years of parenting, drawing on knowledge from books and peer-reviewed articles to ensure reliability and expert information.
Developer Ritesh Kanjee, the owner of startup Augmented AI, said the idea for the tool came from his own struggles as a new parent.
“I was totally overwhelmed by all the conflicting advice out there as well as the long time it would take to read parenting books. I wanted to make something that helps parents cut through the noise and feel confident,” he said.
Aria pulls its parenting advice from a large language model trained on diverse, expert-backed books and scientific research including reputable parenting guides. Whereas ChatGPT only provides information, Aria provides the information and cites where it came from.
Kanjee developed the tool to advise parents “from bump to under 10”, and it features top parenting problems including sleep, tantrums and feeding.
The tool, enhanced by his proprietary Parenting Intelligence Context Engine (Pice), is unique to South Africa because it also seeks to help historically underserved populations.
“Pice enables Aria to deliver hyper-personalised responses by understanding the specific details you provide about your child — such as their age and preferences — and by considering the time of the day to offer the most relevant advice needed,” he said.
Trust and reliability on new AI tools is determined by the specific data and methodology used to build the system, says machine learning specialist and data strategist scientist Callan Abrahams.
“The quality of your dashboard, the quality of your report, the quality of your AI, is really going to depend on the quality of the data,” she said.
“The trust needs to come from the methods and the methods people actually use. If you get a really dodgy data scientist to build you a solution, you can get a dodgy AI solution … The foundations of the data of the solution is important.”
The value of a tool such as Aria is that it “fine-tunes” ChatGPT to provide parenting advice, making AI a “trusted partner in parenting”, Abrahams said.
“I think that AI is a reflection of humanity and how well the AI is trained is also a reflection of how well it can perform.”
South Africa is becoming ripe ground for more AI investment and technologies because of the amount of land available to build new infrastructure including electricity infrastructure to power operation centres, she added.
“I suspect that Africa’s growth will come from the fact that they are massive — I see massive energy projects happening on the continent — obviously that supports our African ecosystem.”
But the country and the continent more broadly remain uncertain about how AI works and what it can be used for.
“Once we have a certain dependence on it then we can ask ‘how do we do this in a sustainable way?’ Is this something that our society actually wants to use? We can see that chat GPT has so many uses,” Abrahams said.
The government developed an AI framework in 2024 to enable development and investment. It noted that the country’s action plan should be guided by principles such as finding a balance between an enabling environment and required governance, and that AI is used as a tool for communication and public awareness.
Abrahams said South Africa’s potential is being hindered by the quality of data that is built into the systems and infrastructure.
“The biggest thing holding us back is the quality of the data, but again, if we have the right skills, we can overcome that. Then on the other side, it’s still political stuff, like infrastructure and all those things that we need to sort out anyway.”
“How do we build infrastructure to support technology development, because technology only comes after the fact of infrastructure development. So we need to see Johannesburg doing a lot better from this perspective. Our data centers can’t be falling apart.”
Kanjee said Aria is available on WhatsApp, iOS and the web, and will soon launch on Android.
Abrahams said people should approach AI tools like any other app — read the reviews, see who developed it and who backs it, before using it. She added that these tools are not meant to replace jobs but fill the gaps.
“The reality is that we don’t have enough resources in the world for everybody’s jobs to be replaced by AI … In actual fact, it’s doing jobs that were just never done before.”